Well, I started out by agreeing with you. For lots of reasons I won't go into, local cost of living adjustments are a bad idea and employee comp should be as flat as possible. International complications can make that tough but I'm ignoring that.

But in a very fundamental way, I disagree with you. The reality is that you as a job-seeker have options and constraints when you are looking for a job. If a company isn't willing to pay you what you'd get if you were in Boston, but you aren't willing to move, then you have an impasse. If another company is will to pay that, then you take that offer. You have a set of offers and you take the best one available - not one that measures up to a hypothetical ideal.

You may want things, but that is totally immaterial to an employer. It depends on how valuable your skills are and how rare they are, regardless of location.

If you want to participate in profit, then you need to become capital, not labor. Labor sells itself in a competitive market. Prices will be determined by what other, comparable labor is offering itself for, not the value created for the company.

You need to read this:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

If you are calling yourself and marketing yourself as "labor", you have already lost the game.

Last I checked, patio11 is now working as a regular employee with standard salary and benefits.

I'm constrained in my ability to talk about particular negotiations but, to the limited extent that HNers are taking direction from my life decisions, I'd advise you to assume that my negotiations do not frequently include "I consider myself basically a commodity fungible with a few hundred people you could source today and so I guess I'll take whatever the standard offer is."

I have followed a lot of your work. But I cant agree with all of your advice. I have been earning several 100Ks of salary since many years at FANG companies, possibly more than you. The biggest leverage for me has been from having multiple offers and performing well enough in the technical interviews to get an offer at an appropriate level. Me thinking of myself as a unicorn/laborer played no part in it. I just don't see you highlight any aspect of this in your advice.

Hey Patio11, huge fan of your work :)

If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn to negotiate?

Any resources you could recommend?

He doesn't negotiate. He generates unreasonably large amounts of leverage and uses it against his opponents.

You might be thinking "hey, wait a minute, that sounds like negotiating!". Well... You have to have something to negotiate with.

So the question is how can you generate leverage?

Lucky for you he has written an entire blog post on the subject: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

I am familiar with patio11. I would classify the lead gen system he's set up with his website as capital, not labor.

Also, FWIW: of the vast multitude of ways in which programming creates value for companies, probably only a tiny minority of them lend themselves to the kind of contracting arrangement that he describes. All other programming gets done by labor. Which means that most programmers are labor. How you decide to describe yourself doesn't change that.

i don't have time to read this article to get to what i infer is some discussion about capital vs. labor - it hasn't shown up a few pages into the article - so i'll just reply to what you said outside of the link.

the idea that "woke labor" is non-labor is hilarious. first, this isn't possible for the vast majority of people who actually provide value to capital - you know, the people pouring coffee, or stocking shelves, etc. try being "woke" about your value at a grocery store and let me know how it goes.

second, once enough of your class is "woke" you're back at square 1, trying to beat up people below you to pander to capital. (aside: this sort of "get yours and get out" is emblematic of america generally, and not flattering imo)

that the game is stacked against those who labor is more of a pathological outcome of labor not being very powerful. this is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. it's a bandaid over cancer.

fix the system: organize.

It does work that way long term. Local employers start raising salaries to outbid remote employers. Then remote employers have to raise their offers. Rinse and repeat.

Source: remote worker for over a decade residing in a relatively cheap country